Apparel production begins with basic patterns, or slopers. The designer's original sketch for a garment is translated into muslin--a plain white fabric that shows the grain or direction of the woven thread. The muslin is marked, cut, and sewn into a sample garment. Duplicate samples are then created and corrected to ensure that the pattern is true. The duplicate is then graded into a range of pattern sizes.
Nearly all garments are composed of multiple pattern pieces. Each piece must have clear boundaries and seam allowance added to their borders. Each piece of the pattern size is laid out in a way that will fit the most pattern pieces on the least amount of fabric. This layout, or marker, is used to guide the actual cutting of all pieces laid out on the fabric. Inexpensive garments are often made by stacking the fabric in as many as several hundred plies that are cut simultaneously using a computerized cutting system, although garments that use thicker or heavier thread count or heavier woven fabrics are made in smaller stacks, such as between 5 and 50 plies. Expensive garments are usually formed individually.
A wide variety of cutting systems are used to cut fabric into garment pieces, including knives, saws, shears and laser beam cutting devices. The cutting system might be manually-operated or computer-guided. Where the cutting system is computer-guided, the layout or marker may be digitally encoded in the memory of a computer to guide the cutting system to cut the fabric, or stack of fabric, to form the garment pieces. In this case, the marker is an electronic rendition of the garment pieces. In manually-operated cutting systems, the layout or marker is usually physically attached to, or drawn on, the fabric, or stack of fabric. In this case, the layout or marker is a physical rendition of the garment pieces drawn on a sheet of marker paper that is attached to the fabric (or top layer of the fabric in the case of a stack) with a tacking spray that holds the paper marker in place on the fabric. In either case, the layout or marker guides the cutting system to cut the garment pieces from the fabric.
The pieces of a single marker may comprise all of the pieces of the completed garment, or may comprise multiple copies of one or several pieces of the garment. It is common to assemble a garment made of pieces patterned with different markers, particularly where the garment is formed from different materials.
The process of assembling a garment is also often automated. Computerized sewing machines stitch the garment pieces using a variety of stitch patterns in sequential steps that position and sew the pieces into the finished garment. More expensive garments might be sewn with human-operated sewing machines.
The raw fabric used to make a garment often includes a pattern of images that is repeated at regular intervals along the length and width of a bolt of raw fabric. This fabric, called a print fabric, is formed by dyeing the fabric to form the repeat pattern. For example, a rotary applicator having a mirror image of the pattern embossed thereon might be used in a rotary screen printing process that repeats the pattern each .pi.d along the length of the bolt, where d is the diameter of the actuator. In most finished garments the image pattern and the repeat of the image pattern in the print fabric play no role in planning the completed garment. The placement of the image pattern in relation to each other and in relation to the interval between the repeat pattern on the raw fabric are irrelevant in laying out the markers and cutting and assembling the garment pieces. Thus, the image pattern and pattern repeat are not relevant to planning of images at seams between pieces in the completed garment.
For some garments the layout, or marker, is positioned relative to the image pattern on the fabric to achieve an aesthetically pleasing garment. When this level of planning takes place the image(s) of the print may be centrally located on the completed garment, but the pattern repeat will cause the image pattern to run into the seams of the garment.
Where an image, such as a word, phrase, sports team logo, corporate logo, cartoon character, etc. is to be positioned at a specific position on a garment, the image is added to the garment after the individual component pieces of the garment are cut from bulk fabric or after construction of the full garment. The images are added to a jacket or other garment by any of several techniques, including silk screening, stitching, embroidering, and sewing on a separate applique or decal. It is usually quite expensive to add a single image or multiple images to a garment. Additional handling and post-assembly processing is required, and the process is labor-intensive. There is a need, therefore, for a technique to add specifically positioned images to garments in a less expensive, less labor-intensive manner.